How Events Are Like Books

It’s taken years for publishing companies to become digital media companies. With quarantine, events companies are being forced to make that transition in a fraction of the time. In both cases, they are pure analog experiences that are growing up into digital young adults.

Although the maturation of the virtual event has been accelerated during the pandemic, the screenification of our relationships and events has been slowly building for years. In both cases, it’s connection that brings it to life.

Under Our Noses

Digital has been not-so-quietly taking over the events industry for years. The pandemic may have sped this up but it did not create it. In a 2019 survey, PCMA Education Foundation, a network of business events strategists, heard from 67% of its respondents that they expected to remotely participate in events over the coming three years.

Speakers, the canaries in the coalmine of the events industry, have all been moving online for years, recognizing the power was in the hands of the brand who owned the relationships, not the venue. And selling “direct-to-consumer” for a speaker means keeping 100% of the profits without having to leave their house.

Seeing what was happening in publishing, I’d written a report 2 years ago while working at a retreat center comparing the events business to publishing. I asked the question, do retreat centers need to become digital media companies with an events arm to survive? Companies like MindBodyGreen, Mindvalley and YogaInternational.com understand that scale in the wellness industry, for example, is in digital. But aren’t our bodies designed for campfires, intimate circles, connection?

I’ve talked with many speakers recently about what events look like for them over the next 12 months. For many, this is a time to build relationship with their existing audience and beef up their online offerings. For those cautiously optimistic about late Fall or 2021 in-person events, they expect correctly that events will be smaller. And smaller means more exclusive which means more expensive. Is it possible to sustain a venue or a yoga studio on 50% occupancy? Prices will most likely increase and hybrid events will occur where people will sell cheaper digital tickets to make up for fewer “butts in chairs”. Does this mean in-person becomes the new luxury, only available to those who can afford it, like organic food and private school? 

The Future is Quality

The main producers of imagery used to be broadcast networks. Now, it’s all of us. In a world where anyone can make anything (almost), quality becomes increasingly important. But what is quality? Is it about production values? Youtube has taught us to watch low-quality video and love it, if it’s funny or charming or shocking enough. Low quality can even inspire a level of authenticity that perfect production values sometimes don’t. I think quality is about connection. I’ve seen three trends in the virtual events space that play with the screen’s ability to help people feel connected:

Being a Mirror

Back when I was a producer at MTV, we did something no network had done before. We put our audience on the air. Whether it was the show Spring Break or The Real World, viewers saw themselves on the screen. That helped transform MTV form a channel to a movement and to a voice for a generation.

Although Zoom and other forms of digital conversation are interactive technologies, they are being used primarily for one-way conversations. Experts and teachers are talking at people, audiences are listening. After all these years of watching TV, I guess we’re used to this dynamic. There have been examples of virtual events that have brought the audience to life though and put them on the screen. These virtual events have made me feel more connected to my fellow viewers and less alone at home. Jared Matthew Weiss’ Touchpoint event did this beautifully the other night with an opening sequence where the camera randomly lands on one of the 100+ people on the Zoom call. Whoever gets picked has to hug themselves. As the host chooses at random, a face fills the screen, you can see their surprise and delight as they register it’s them – like a face on the big screen at a baseball game - and they hug themselves. We were all laughing, sharing a moment.

How can you use your virtual event to facilitate more direct contact between the participant and the expert or with each other? My daughter’s friend is a big fan of singer, Ben Platt. Being able to talk to him during his recent virtual event was thrilling. It plays on what popular app Cameo does when it lets ordinary people pay celebrities to record personalized messages for fans. We don’t want to just be the audience anymore, we want to be the content.

Psychological Ownership

Psychological Ownership is a term used when people feel more investment in a product. For example, when you build your Ikea shelf, you feel more connected to that shelf. Some rules of psychological ownership are valuable for virtual events as well. Increase customer control over the content. I see a lot of people asking for questions before a virtual Q&A or polling audiences about what they’d like more of but what are other ways that you can engage your audience in helping you create your event? The more they feel like they helped design the event, the more invested they will be in showing up for it and promoting it.

Synchronicity

I was speaking to a friend in NYC the other day and asked her what she missed most during quarantine. She said synchronicity, like when you run into an old friend at a bar. It’s true that there isn’t a lot of that when you’re sheltering-in-place. The brain finds unexpected pleasures more rewarding than an expected one. 

Online networking events have given me the biggest taste of this feeling. At a Women in Tech virtual event a few weeks ago, I met some great women in a “room”. I don’t see a lot of this type of free mixing happening though. There’s a lot we can learn from the Un-conference world that is relevant here. If I were a popular bar in NYC for example, I’d host Zooms where everyone was a co-host, which means they can move in and out of “rooms” and “bump into each other” freely.

The Heart of the Matter

Relationship is wired into us and the people and brands who can make us feel, seen, heard, and understood in any kind of event will be the ones that get us to show up and come back again and again. Remember any boring conferences you’ve attended? In-person doesn’t guarantee a transformational event. 

It takes connection to bring any moment to life, whether high-touch or touching a screen. I think about my dog-eared copy of Byron Katie’s book, “Loving What Is”. I turn towards it like a friend because it has answers to my questions and inspirations for my self-doubt. When virtual events can live in that same part of our brains, we’ll know we’ve created an experience which is not just a substitute for the real thing but a new type of real thing in and of itself. On the app, Nextdoor, someone was offering remote babysitting, saying she could watch kids virtually while parents worked from home. I’m intrigued to see what new technologies will be born out of this unprecedented time and the ways we’ll be relating in the years to come.